Lawyers who earned hundreds of millions suing Big Tobacco are now going after major food...

Lawyers who earned hundreds of millions suing Big Tobacco are now going after major food companies such as PepsiCo (PEP), Heinz (HNZ) and General Mills (GIS) for wrongly labeling products and ingredients. One gem is calling sugar "evaporated cane juice," while rather more scarily, a ConAgra (CAG) "propellant" in Pam cooking spray includes petroleum gas, propane and butane.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... but they still won't tell you things about processes used, such as for those sculpted small carrots and the reason they get a white dust on them is that they are soaked in chlorine solution for preservation before packaging. While I hear scary stories from former McDonald's employees, one can only wonder about the process issues one might find therein.

While I can't help being appalled at 'hundreds of millions earned' by said lawyers, when I would prefer that firms paid fines or were punished in a more appropriate manner, I can't fault them for encouraging transparency and honesty. Especially if it can result in finding out things such as you say happen with carrots....

Well no surprise there - it was only a matter of time before the lawyers found something else they could make money on. However the thought of using a cooking oil containing petroleum gas, propane and butane is indeed scary. Thing is though - I wonder how many of us actually have the time to read through the labels of everything thing we buy in the supermarket !!!

No one's gotten a $28 cheque from a class action lawsuit settlement in decades. These days you get a coupon good for $2 off a future purchase of the company's products while the lawyers collect millions in cash. A lot of things would be very different if the law required that lawyers be compensated in the same way as their clients; i.e., if the class gets a $2 coupon, the lawyers get a bunch of $2 coupons too.

It is merely a dimension of the re-emergence of mercantilism, or as it is recognised today, corporatism. It owns the US, its government, and the people it employs. The only good thing used to be that most people worked outside this cage, but perhaps that is not so anymore. Sad.

"People doubt the US is a fundamentally hostile place to do business now? Things like this. Constant assault from lawyers, regulators, and demagogic politicians. "

Please view the recent documentary "Hot Coffee". It is a wonderful expose of Corporate America and the neocapitalist attack on rightful litigation as a fraudulent attack on old-fashioned, idealist, American capitalist principles. This documentary, though all with slants, paints a very real picture of the landscape of American capitalism, media, and politics.

I highly recommend all view this documentary (especially if you have posted a comment here)

Why are propane and butane "scary"? They have such low boiling points it will evaporate before ingestion, and if not, they are alkanes, humans cannot digest them. It would be like eating a candle. Totally harmless.

The armies of lawyers that exist in the US are so large that they now do more damage than good for the average person.

We need to find a way to make it easier for individuals to allow the individual to take action against large corporation and government agencies, while at the same time making it much more difficult for large-scale corporate lawyer type actions..Lawyers have done a lot of good in terms of bringing things to the public light over the years, but they have more and more been doing nothing but enrich themselves while those they supposedly represent get little.

One thing we definately should do is to remove the requirement that a lawyer has to administer your estate. That is nothing but legalized theft. We have too many laws, too many rules, and too many damn lawyers.